Let’s talk about “From the River to the Sea”

Are they finally saying the quiet part out loud? Reflections of a Left Secular Jew

I will be burned at the stake for this essay. So let me just start by saying: deliberate mass slaughter of civilians is always wrong, no matter who does it, or what preceded it, or what the purported justification is, or who has the most or the least blood on his hands. Consequently, I support a ceasefire in Gaza, and also the return of the 240 Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas October 7 when Hamas slaughtered 1,400 Israelis in one day (making it the largest number of Jewish civilians killed in a single day since the Holocaust).

Supporting a ceasefire (and the return of hostages—that part is always absent in the Palestinian solidarity rallies in the West) is the only moral position, whatever the result may be for Israel and future attacks by Hamas. Ongoing daily mass slaughter of civilians cannot be justified by any moral compass. Period.

However, I live a great distance from the Middle East. There is not much I personally can do to bring about a ceasefire and the return of hostages except write poems and Substack essays and sling tweets.

What I DO know something about is the latent, and now blatant, anti-Jewish sentiment that has flared up in the Palestinian solidarity movement in my own town and in other cities across North America and Western Europe. It’s as though the unspoken boundary on the left that always separated legitimate criticism of Israel from age-old deep narratives of Jew-hate has evaporated since Israel began bombing Gaza in retaliation for the October 7 Hamas strike and hostage-taking.

Last Saturday afternoon, I was wandering around downtown Nanaimo with my staple gun and packing tape, putting up posters for my open mic coffeehouse this weekend. I had forgotten it was a National Day of Action for Gaza, with a rally and march through downtown Nanaimo.

What I had not forgotten was that a few days earlier, the lampposts on Commercial Street were adorned with the red and white posters of the Israeli kidnap victims taken by Hamas October 7. When I was postering on Saturday, the lampposts were bare. The kidnap posters had been removed.

I had already commented on twitter/X about the disturbing trend of these posters being torn down in other cities—in some cases openly by Palestinian solidarity activists, who were shown on camera.

I was in a popular coffee shop on Commercial Street, talking to the owner and then taping my poster to the wall, when I heard the Nanaimo rally approach from up the street. I looked out through the tinted windows of the coffee shop and saw all my friends and allies of 40 years from the peace movement, environmental actions, poetry of witness, Take Back the Night, International Women’s Day—four decades of progressive activism and solidarity in this town, all streaming past the coffee shop on a cause I have always supported: justice for Palestinians. I was getting ready to rush out and join them, ready to receive the welcome I knew I would get from my comrades, when I heard the chant.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

Over and over, louder and louder.

In a split second, everything shifted inside me. What had seemed like a vibrant and familiar, idealistic demonstration, now felt and looked like a paramilitary exercise, a mindless rage-fueled mass formation in search of a scapegoat, reciting chants and slogans they almost certainly didn’t understand.

The current state of Israel exists on some of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, along with 7 million Jews who reside there, including my own cousins. By every logical measure, this chant—mandatory now at all Palestinian solidarity rallies in the West—is calling for the elimination of Israel.

I retreated to the darkest corner of the coffee shop, which I knew from experience could not be seen by passers-by on the sidewalk in the brightness of the day through the tinted windows. My initial impulse to run out and join my comrades had vanished. Every cell in my body was speaking to me in a language of ice-cold fear. I stayed rooted to my spot not because of any ideological incompatibility around social justice concepts, but because I did not feel safe at that moment in that crowd. As a Jew.

There are scenes in Schindler’s List that are less chilling than the raging mob of 300 people that stormed past the coffee shop, angrily chanting for an end to Israel. It took several minutes for the entire procession to pass.

I spent the next two days processing this coffee shop moment. What had I witnessed? What had I felt in my body? What kind of Dark Age are we entering? Can we prevent it? Is our species now doomed to descend into othering and a vengeance mentality over each new political chapter in our shared existence?

I was processing not just the coffee shop moment but also a larger question: For years I had the niggling sense that “anti-Zionism” was being used as the legitimating cover story for deep-seated intractable anti-Semitism. I had brushed off that notion many times over the years because of the righteousness of the social justice cause. But had my instincts been right all along?

By the third day, just before I went to bed, I posted this question on twitter/X:

A variety of replies rolled in the following day (today) to explain to me what the future of Israel will be in this paradisiacal vision of a free Palestine “from the river to the sea.”

According to @leftrefusnik, my cousins (and presumably the 7 million other Jews currently living in Israel) should be deported when Palestine becomes “free.”

According to @shutupitssme, “ethnostates don’t have the right to exist,” so a sort of egalitarian one-state solution with “reparations” to Palestinians seems to be the vision.

But then I become “racist” and ‘islamophobic” when I ask @shutupitssme how he knows this magical utopian One State of Free Palestine will be secular instead of Hamas’s preference for Sharia law.

And finally, I am a “Zionist justifying genocide” by merely asking what the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means, if not the elimination of Israel.

So there you have it.

Human rights: good (when it’s the approved victims).

Questioning the meaning of solidarity slogans: bad.

See you in cyberspace, my lovelies!